Xenithar is so good to me. She agreed to do yet another art trade when I came and asked, and she's put up with me plenty of times before. This is easily the most extravagant trade piece I've ever done, and I think I'm done doing them for a while. (I need to focus on other things)
So I started in on this piece by battling with the original pose I had of the character. I was also having a problem with the terrain, which is meant to be somewhere in a jungle. It was pretty much too flat for my liking, and the angle of the character kept bothering me. I got through the inks and started on the coloring .... then decided to scrap the whole thing and start over. I'm very happy I did this. I was so much more comfortable working on this during round two than I was with the first try.
I very much enjoyed the coloration of the character, and I also had quite a bit of fun with the lighting here. This is the first time I've tried to do some kind of light beam, and while I have room to improve, I don't think I did too badly for an initial attempt. What I did was to select a region with the Free Select tool and filled it with a gradient (foreground to transparent, specifically) then selected a smaller region inside of that and did a second gradient of a lighter shade. After that I cut out some shafts where the character was blocking the light, then played around with some motion blurring. I found out you have to be careful if you use this method for a light shaft, solely because it tends to move the light one way or another. So, if you have your light cut out around the shape of a figure, it might need to be adjusted afterward.
Character is copyright S. A. Thorup. Done in GiMP in 4 hours......and my hand is officially on vacation.
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